Tindersticks
The Something Rain

Speaking about an album like "The Something Rain" a year after its release serves to shed a new benevolent light on this treasure chest of beauty. It serves to open the wardrobe and wear our favorite coat again, to wrap ourselves in it, preserving all the warmth of our body as we face the chill of winter.

Because Tindersticks' sound is a symphony of elegance, a warm and velvety voice, mature, from an exceptional crooner like Stuart A. Staples. It's the sound of a unique band, seminal, because it's recognizable instantly by those who have had the ears to listen and have followed the artistic, cinematic journey of this nocturnal orchestra with its obliquely intimate mood, masterfully balanced on live, exposed emotions. "The Something Rain" is an album for a sky covered with clouds, but not threatening ones, they are post-storm clouds, when the downpour has subsided and one is left enchanted by the redness that hints at better days to come. It's that melancholic sense of loss that autumn leaves us with, something that fades while we want to cling, somehow, to that memory.

It opens with "Chocolate," a delicate spoken intro, ancestrally linked to "My Sister" from Tindersticks II, followed by "Show Me Everything," tinged with soul yet martial in rhythm. "This Fire of Autumn" is an electrifying folk gallop, epic like the sunlight at sunset. "A Night So Still" is pure heartache, the search for the warm body of a lover as you move in sleep and discover the emptiness beside you. "Shippin' Shoes" is a rhythmic and warbling ballad, dragging you into a whirlpool where we let ourselves be swallowed up. "Medicine" is an antidote to pain, a last holdout to keep from giving in. Then "Frozen," deep, intimately Portishead-like, a warm embrace to Beth complete with a "sick" sax counterpoint. It's a smoky, dense track, conveying the sense of an embrace in the fog. With "Come Inside" comes a bit of peace, contentment, a serene and detached contemplation, a melancholic basking with oneself. "Goodbye Joe" closes, an instrumental breath, a trail in the sky to follow with disillusionment for the magic that has been lived.

(I met Stuart and company at the Ruvido Club in Bologna in the distant 1994, here I find them magnificently, uniquely themselves again, after the reunion, at the highest levels as in "The Hungry Saw." Purely Tindersticks).